EMC World – Day 2 – ViPR: Software Defined Storage

The theme of EMC World 2013 is the Software Defined Datacenter. Once of the big announcements is ViPR, which promises to be the Logitech Harmony remote for the storage infrastructure. Instead of having to do all the steps of storage provisioning manually, ViPR will automate most of these steps. The goal: more efficient management and a much faster time to implement at lower cost. And just look at the logo… that alone is worth buying the product! 😉

So gone is the era of manually zoning a server to all your storages, adding them to storage groups, creating storage pools and LUNs and gluing it all together. Just click a button in the ViPR interface and it will do all these steps using existing and new API’s.

Yesterday we – the EMC Elect – had the chance to talk with a couple of the people behind the development of ViPR. We talked about its basic functionality, how the system works from a technical point of view.

ViPR positions itself on the Control plane and does not interfere with the Data plane. This means that it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel each and every time but use existing features (e.g. replication, snapshotting) that are already included in the various arrays. ViPR will configure them, tune them where possible and then step out of the way.

Of course – us being technical folks – there’s always some skepticism and “trust issues” around having a piece of software touch and reconfigure your entire environment. With a bit of luck we should be receiving an early copy of the thing to check it all out for ourselves… exciting!!